Saturday night, following the Hasbro fan media event at Toy Fair, we posted an article addressing concerns raised about Titans Return Chromedome. Its similarity to Combiner Wars Dead End led to thoughts it might be that very toy remolded, but we explained it wasn't so, and talked about a prior example of similar repeated engineering. Ben Yee also felt the need to debunk this rumor, and in a post on his site even offers a new tidbit of information on this subject! Keep reading to find out what else we've learned and get a link to the article.

The post on BWTF.com goes in to a little further specifics on how Chromedome notably differs from Dead End - affirming as we did (click here to read our article about these two toys) that every single part is different from that found on Dead End and its mold family. But Ben also related the very interesting new info from the Q&A session on Saturday that Dead End was utilized by Takara's team as a design model in engineering the Headmaster/Titan Master feature for Titans Return! So it seems that this isn't just a case of taking inspiration from an earlier toy, but actually using it as a literal design basis for the new toy. And while for some it's understandably a little disappointing - after all, there's very little to be surprised by when the engineering is replicated so thoroughly - it makes a great deal of sense. Dead End was a very solid "generic car" body type, with a straight forward transformation that led to a robot mode that could easily be repurposed for a lot of characters with just a bit of parts interchange. It's particularly good for Titans Return and updating classic Headmaster cars who often had basically flat panel chests. While I personally hope that the Chromedome mold and its pretool moldmate (that is to say, the Streetwise to its Dead End) don't end up seeing substantial reuse through the Titans Return line and instead leave room for other unique designs to fill out the majority of characters, it's hard to deny that keeping this engineering design in circulation has provided a solid foundation for a range of potential characters to be revisited.

You can check out Ben's article about Chromedome and Dead End on BWTF.com by clicking here.